Shark Week Activities – Day 1

This week our focus for school work is everything “shark”. The boys are heavily into sharks and megladons at the moment, so I promised them a week of jolly jaws. Luckily it’s a very popular theme, and I found a million resources online, unlike that time last month when my 5 year old asked for an Abraham Lincoln themed Easter Basket, because “I’m just really into him right now”. Er ok. Ya getting a peep. Pretend it’s got a top hat.

We are sticking to our CREW routine for the theme part of our day, we Create, Read, Educate, and Watch. Today’s video was a completely awesome one from PBS (link at the bottom). If you’ve not watched Wild Kratts, it’s well worth a look. It’s on at 7am on PBS and has an ace tie in app. For our educational reading William did a readworks article and questions, also linked below. It was interesting, but the multiple choice were a little obvious, so he didn’t have to read that closely, it was an ace starting point for day one though. One thing I do love about Read Works is the ability for kids to answer the questions online, if you don’t have a printer/ want to be a little more environmentally friendly, this is a perfect way to do it. Will really struggles with his handwriting in comparison to his reading abilities, so I generally print things out for him, to give him some extra pencil grip time .

For the craft you will need

Card stock/paper (preferably in a “sharky” color
White paper for teeth
Red paper/card stock for inside of mouth (could possibly skip this step)
Scissors
Glue stick
Pen to draw on eyes, or google-y eyes of you have them!

Instead of the step by step guide the YouTube video I followed for this just demonstrates making one of these. I highly recommend watching it a couple of times before you do this with kids, as parts of it (adding the bottom lip of the shark) are not very well shown. My kids don’t like to stop once they start something. So me having to replay and pause it multiple times whilst they flailed around with their kids scissors and multiple glue sticks without lids everywhere wasn’t ideal. To be honest this entire bottom lip part could have been skipped. It’s a cute addition, but it’s really no less sharky without it.

I also pre cut out the fins and tail for the kids, so they just had to glue them on. This saved a ton of time and tears over who had better fins.

One thing I didn’t do, but wish I had, was draw guide lines onto Teddy’s shark for him, so he knew where to cut. He started out ok, but would have definitely benefitted from some lines to follow.

Here are our finished Sharks: peep the SEVEN eyes on Teddy’s. To each their own. I’m not one to get all technical and detail-y with a 4 year old. We’ve got another 14ish years to hammer home the fact most things have 2 eyes only.